The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

the Marvellous. Reprinted by permission of the author.

AN INDELIBLE STAIN UPON THE SKY copyright © Simon Strantzas 2011. Originally published in Nightingale Songs. Reprinted by permission of the author.

HAIR copyright © Joan Aiken Estate 2011. Originally published in The Monkey’s Wedding and Other Stories and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction No. 696, July/August 2011. Reprinted by permission of Small Beer Press and the author’s estate.

MIRI copyright © Steve Rasnic Tem 2011. Originally published in Blood and Other Cravings. Reprinted by permission of the author.

CORBEAUX BAY copyright © Geeta Roopnarine 2011. Originally published in Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories About Birds. Reprinted by permission of the author.

SAD, DARK THING copyright © Michael Marshall Smith 2011. Originally published in A Book of Horrors. Reprinted by permission of the author.

SMITHERS AND THE GHOSTS OF THE THAR copyright © Agberg Ltd. 2011. Originally published in Ghosts by Gaslight: Stories of Steampunk and Supernatural Suspense. Reprinted by permission of the author.

QUIETA NON MOVERE copyright © Reggie Oliver 2011. Originally published in The Eighth Black Book of Horror. Reprinted by permission of the author.

THE CRAWLING SKY copyright © Joe R. Lansdale 2011. Originally published on Subterranean, Spring 2011. Reprinted by permission of the author.

WAIT copyright © Conrad Williams 2011. Originally published in Haunts: Reliquaries of the Dead. Reprinted by permission of the author.

THE OCEAN GRAND, NORTH WEST COAST copyright © Simon Kurt Unsworth 2011. Originally published in Quiet Houses. Reprinted by permission of the author.

THEY THAT HAVE WINGS copyright © Debra L. Hammond as literary heir of Evangeline Walton 2011. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction No. 698, November/December 2011. Reprinted by permission of the author’s agent and estate.

WHITE ROSES, BLOODY SILK copyright © Thana Niveau 2011. Originally published on Delicate Toxins: An Anthology Inspired by Hanns Heinz Ewers. Reprinted by permission of the author.

THE MUSIC OF BENGT KARLSSON, MURDERER copyright © John Ajvide Lindqvist 2011. English translation copyright © Marlaine Delargy 2011. Originally published in A Book of Horrors. Reprinted by permission of the author.

PASSING THROUGH PEACEHAVEN copyright © Ramsey Campbell 2011. Originally published in Portents. Reprinted by permission of the author.

HOLIDAY HOME copyright © David Buchan 2011. Originally published in Daily Frights 2012: 366 Days of Dark Flash Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.

NECROLOGY: 2011 copyright © Stephen Jones and Kim Newman 2012.

USEFUL ADDRESSES copyright © Stephen Jones 2012.

In memory of

RAY BRADBURY

(1920–2012)

To the dust returned

Introduction HORROR IN 2011

IN JANUARY, HarperCollins US changed the name of its genre imprint Eos to Harper Voyager, to bring the list in line with the publisher’s UK and Australian sister companies to create a global brand.

America’s second-largest bookstore chain, Borders, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in February with debts totalling $1.29 billion and assets of $1.275 billion. Despite closing more than 200 stores over the following few months, Borders eventually announced it was going into liquidation in July after no bidders for the troubled chain came forward. The remaining stores finally closed their doors in September.

February also saw the surprise collapse of Canada’s largest book distributor, H. B. Fenn & Company, when the company filed for bankruptcy with liabilities of around $25.6 million. The company’s entire workforce of more than 125 employees was laid off immediately.

RED group Retail, Australia and New Zealand’s largest bookseller with such chains as Angus & Robertson and Borders (no connection to the US bookstore), was also placed into voluntary administration the same month, with debts of around A$51.8 million.

In better news, the struggling HMV sold British bookshop chain Waterstone’s to Russian billionaire Alexander Mamut for ?57 million. Bookseller James Daunt, owner of six independent Daunt Bookshops in London, was named as managing director and announced that he wanted the 296-branch chain “to feel like your local bookstore”.

A year after putting itself up for sale, America’s biggest bookseller, Barnes & Noble, received an injection of $204 million in August when conglomerate Liberty Media purchased a stake in the company, but declined to buy the company outright.

In October, Amazon Publishing announced that it would be launching 47 North, a new science fiction, fantasy and horror imprint edited by Alex Carr. The new imprint was named after the latitude co-ordinates in Seattle where Amazon is based. Titles would be available in print, audio and, of course, Kindle formats.

At the beginning of the year it was revealed that a new American edition of Mark Twain’s classic 1884 novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn had replaced the use of the racially offensive word “nigger” with “slave”, to make it more acceptable to modern readers. However, some critics complained that the censored version was “cultural vandalism” and was at odds with the anti-racist theme that Twain was writing about. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is reportedly the fourth most-banned book in US schools.

In May, a survey amongst secondary school English teachers in the UK found that they were ditching classic novels and Shakespeare from their curriculum because boys aged eleven to fourteen said they lost interest if the book they were studying was longer than 200 pages.

That same month, an investigation by the London Evening Standard newspaper discovered that one in three children in the city did not own a single book, one in four schoolchildren aged eleven could not read or write properly, and one in five school leavers was unable to read confidently.

Meanwhile, in December the results of a survey conducted by the UK’s National Literacy Trust revealed that around 3.8 million children in the country did not own a book. This meant that almost a third of all British children did not have any reading material, with boys again being the most likely to be missing out.

In Stephen King’s 11/22/63, a man dying of cancer travelled back through a wormhole in a Maine diner to a specific day in 1958 and attempted to prevent the assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald five years later. Curiously, the book was retitled 11.22.63 in the UK, but not 22.11.63!

The paperback edition of King’s Full Dark, No Stars added a new short story, “Under the Weather”, to the original four novellas.

J. K. Rowling planned to start exclusively selling the e-book versions of all seven of her Harry Potter novels via her new Pottermore.com website, which was supposed to launch in October but suffered from technical delays. Once fully operational, the free site would also offer other Potter-related material, including interactive games.

Meanwhile, the estate of a man claiming that Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire